Week 36/2026

In July and August, Cinema Zed, like many Belgian cinemas, screened films by Ingmar Bergman. This Monday, Smultronstället [Wild Strawberries] (1957) closes the Leuven series. The elderly Professor Isak Borg, played by Victor Sjöström in his final screen performance, travels to receive an honorary doctorate, confronting memories, dreams and missed opportunities along the way. Bergman said the idea came to him during a drive from Stockholm to Dalarna, when he passed his grandmother’s house in Uppsala and imagined opening the door and suddenly returning to his childhood. Later, he’d revise the story: “That’s a lie. The truth is that I am forever living in my childhood.”

Over the coming months, BUDA will screen all six of Jacques Tati’s feature films. This Thursday, his debut, Jour de fête (1949), is showing. Tati plays François, a bumbling village postman who, after seeing a film about the hyper-modern American postal service at a local fair, decides to speed up his rounds. The result is, of course, complete chaos. In his films, Tati, an unrivalled “historian of the present” (as Kristin Ross put it), reveals how strange and inexplicable our supposedly familiar world really is. Perhaps that is why Pedro Costa once remarked: “In a normal world, one would go out and walk into just any theater to see a film by Jacques Tati.” For the coming months, Kortrijk will thus find itself in a normal, strange world!

To mark its 60th anniversary, Ousmane Sembène’s debut, La noire de… (1966), returns to the big screen in a new 4K restoration this Friday at De Cinema. Based on one of his own short stories, it follows Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who leaves Dakar to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy French couple in Antibes. What begins as a dream of living in France soon turns into a humiliating and suffocating experience. Sembène portrays her alienation and the neocolonial exploitation he described as a “new black slave trade”. Often regarded as the first film from sub-Saharan Africa to receive widespread international acclaim, La noire de… was met with a lukewarm critical reception upon its release. Sembène nevertheless refused to tailor his cinema to Western expectations: “To show it to an international film audience in Dakar, that was something. […] What matters is getting your message to your intended audience. With La noire de…, I felt I’d done my job as an artist.”